Kurdistan Parliament

Humanitarian expert Stafford Clarry was United Nations Security Coordinator during the ‘brother’s war’, an internal armed conflict between competing political factions in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1990s. Clarry explains the complex dynamic of this difficult period, recalling that in 1995 there were four separate conflicts happening at one time.

Humanitarian expert Stafford Clarry describes that once the Kurdistan Regional Government was established in 1992, the Iraqi government blocked many international NGOs from operating in the Kurdistan region.

Colonel Harry Schute (Ret), commander of the U.S. Army 404th Civil Affairs Battalion responsible for the Kurdistan Region during the Second Gulf War, talks about efforts he and his soldiers made to convince U.S. leadership not to attempt to disarm the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters–their close allies in Northern Iraq. This involved bringing two rival factions of the Peshmerga together to work on an influential report that articulated their historical role in the region.